Events that shaped the Cape’s national park: Relocating lighthouses

Wednesday

Mar 9, 2011 at 12:01 AMMar 9, 2011 at 9:13 AM

When Cape Cod National Seashore was created in 1961, the federal government didn’t just inherit 44,000 acres of empty land; it took on the challenges that come with running a national park in a dynamic coastal setting home to feisty individualists and tight-knit communities. From lighthouse relocations to controversies over historic preservation, here are some of the events that kept life interesting for the park’s leaders over the last 50 years.

Relocating lighthouses

Kaimi Rose Lum

When Cape Cod National Seashore was created in 1961, the federal government didn’t just inherit 44,000 acres of empty land; it took on the challenges that come with running a national park in a dynamic coastal setting home to feisty individualists and tight-knit communities. From lighthouse relocations to controversies over historic preservation, here are some of the events that kept life interesting for the park’s leaders over the last 50 years.

Relocating lighthouses

When Thoreau visited Truro’s Highland Light in the 1850s, one of the first things he noticed was how fast the bluff underneath it seemed to be wearing away.

“Small streams of water trickling down it at intervals of two or three rods have left the intermediate clay in the form of steep Gothic roofs 50 feet high or more, the ridges as sharp and rugged-looking as rocks; and in one place the bank is curiously eaten out in the form of a large semicircular crater,” he wrote in “Cape Cod.” The keeper had predicted that “ere-long, the lighthouse must be moved.”

The white brick light tower, the first seen by ships approaching Massachusetts from Europe, stood about 330 feet from the edge of the towering cliff in the mid-1800s. By the early 1990s, that distance had shrunk to just over 100 feet – a worrisome statistic for the Seashore, which acquired Highland Light from the Coast Guard around that time. Standing 66 feet tall, the oldest and highest lighthouse on Cape Cod and an active aid to navigation, the Truro beacon was an icon. The citizens of the town would not stand by to watch it topple into the Atlantic, nor would the Seashore, which recognized its historic significance.

A campaign to preserve the light began in the mid-1990s, led by Gordon Russell and Bob Firminger of the Truro Historical Society, who raised $150,000. The federal government pitched in $1 million, and the state contributed $500,000. In the summer of 1996, the relocation of the lighthouse began.

It was no easy task to slide the 404-ton tower 450 feet back from its position atop the cliff, but on July 18 crews from International Chimney and Expert House Movers got to work, easing the jacked-up lighthouse along steel I-beams set up like a railroad system and greased with Ivory Soap. It would take 10 days to relocate the light, edged forward at a rate of about one inch per hour, to its new foundation. For the hundreds of people who gathered at the scene, it was like watching the moon move.

By July 29, 1996, Highland Light was settled in its new position. Four months later local officials joined Seashore Superintendent Maria Burks and Congressman Gerry Studds in flipping the switch that relit the tower.

“It was a really positive experience that brought the community and the Park Service together,” says Burke.

That same year the National Seashore moved Nauset Light 300 feet back from the edge of a bluff overlooking Eastham’s Nauset Light Beach. Originally one of Chatham’s twin lights, the red-and-white lighthouse had already been relocated once, in 1923, when it was brought to Eastham to replace the decommissioned beacons known as the Three Sisters.

The move, “happened a lot quicker [than Highland Light]. They put it on a flatbed and they drove it. I think it took maybe a day or two,” says Burke.

Land acquisition

The federal government undertook more than 2,000 land acquisitions to flesh out the coastal and inland holdings of Cape Cod National Seashore, obtaining properties that ranged from small patches of land around single-family homes to a 251-acre tract of sand in the Province Lands.

In 2009, the Seashore scored a major victory for land preservation when it secured an easement on 57 acres of pristine woodland in North Truro. The park had been negotiating with the owners of the North of Highland Campground for several years, hoping to finalize a deal that would protect the stretch of wilderness from future development. It took several waves of appropriations in Congress – and the support of Congressman William Delahunt and Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry – to put together the $1.75 million in federal funding needed to purchase a conservation easement on the property.

“It was the largest single piece of private property in the Seashore,” says Superintendent George Price. When the deal came through, Price called it “a twofer.”

“It basically keeps land, open space, in conservation, and it provides primitive campsites,” Price told the Banner in March 2009. With the changing economics of the Outer Cape chipping away at visitors’ ability to enjoy the Seashore in a low-cost, low-impact way, the acquisition ensured that camping would be able to continue in the park.